GIS | MIT Center for Civic Media

Last fall the Center for Civic Media launched a new partnership with the Boston Globe, the preeminent newspaper in the Boston and New England region. Part of this partnership means that we get access to the last year or so of their archives via their alpha API. And one of the first things we noticed about the API data is that Boston Globe reporters have to enter a location for their news story.

At the Center, we think that media attention matters - in both quantity and quality. This geodata provided a perfect entry to studying how media attention from the Boston Globe plays out spatially across Boston neighborhoods and Massachusetts towns. And with access to the text of the articles associated with different places, we could start to answer some questions about not just the amount of media attention a place receives but how that attention is framed.

Title: KoBoMapFeatured Image:http://www.kobotoolbox.org/sites/m/images/KoBoMap_0.pngDescription: KoBoMap is part of the KoBo Toolbox, a set of open-source tools for data collection and analysis currently under development at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Probably the greatest thing about KoBo is that it has the limited internet connectivity in mind in all its products, adding offline syncing capabilities to all of them. In essence, you can collect, analyze, sync and map your data without having access to the internet.External Link:http://www.kobotoolbox.org/products/kobomapLocation: Cambridge, MA (42.373939,-71.122624)Name of Organization: KoBo Toolbox currently developed at the Harvard Humanitarian InitiativeCategory: Toolkit (containing mobile apps, software and online platforms)Tags: research, data collection, survey, offline capabilities